Memory Market Overview: April 2005. Page 2

This month we will pay most attention to the situation in the memory chips market, the pricing and the company shares there. Also, we will certainly mention the latest achievements in the memory technology development and try to predict what the coming spring is going to bring us.

Another memory module maker who offered overclocking-friendly solutions in March appeared TwinMOS, very unexpectedly, I should say. They announced their Speed Premium product family based on DDR433 promising that these solutions would overclock up to 466MHz. It is interesting to point out here that these memory modules are built on the same popular Winbond BH-5 chips, as the modules from OCZ. Although in this case they should cost a little less.

TwinMOS has also reminded if itself in one more market segment: So-DIMM solutions for notebooks. Keeping pace with the time, the company announced DDR2-533 notebook modules for Sonoma platform. However, that was just an announcement: they never revealed the actual release date. Adtec, by the way, stood out in a more remarkable way: they announced DDR2-533 MicroDIMM modules with up to 1GB capacity and a price of about $770. Now all they need is the support of minimum 1GB of memory in that notebook…

Adtec DDR2-533 MicroDIMM

Another field where miniature memory modules are quite demanded is the traditional server blade platforms. This is where Apacer targets its 1GB SO-DIMM DDR-266 memory modules. Of course, this modules is a Registered one. Although, Registered memory modules become less popular here nowadays: FB-DIMMs are getting closer, and the trial production of these modules on DDR2 chips has already been started on Samsung fabs. The Koreans are ready to begin mass production of these modules any minute, as soon as the chipsets supporting FB-DIMM memory are out in the market.

Apacer 1GB SO-DIMM DDR-266

TwinMOS stuck to about the same approach in March. At CeBIT the company showcased the first prototypes of their DDR2-800 modules based on Elpida chips. Everything was great, and 6.4Gbps is a nice bandwidth, but unfortunately, there are no chipsets yet supporting it in the nominal mode. So, they are going to start actually producing these modules some time in summer (especially since Elpida starts mass production of the corresponding chips only in May also). Besides, at first they will be manufacturing very limited quantities of these modules: only for extreme overclocking fans.